Absolute Citroën

My first car, and I feel I have the right to call it my first because it felt like home when I was in it, was my grandparents’ 1971 Citroën.

Citroëns are French cars designed by engineers whose fingers are on the pulse of the ultramodern. Grandma’s ride was avant-garde, at least for a towheaded, red-white-and-blue Reno girl like me.

Nobody had a Citroën. The one my grandparents owned they had bought in the United States shortly after moving from Australia. It was unique, which, according to my first-through-sixth-grade sensibilities, made me unique.

My summer vacations were spent with grandma and that car—and cousins, often topless or bottomless toddlers. When vacations were over, I often told my classmates about the months I’d spent catching a lift in Grandma Winnie’s foreign sedan. Nobody had ever heard of the car, but when I described it to them, they could understand it was very hip. I was edgy. Little did I know I would be setting the trend in everything I did all the way through high school. God, I was cool.

The coffee-with-cream colored car was the ’70s version of futuristic. It was the type of car I imagined June Lockhart drove when she wasn’t filming Lost in Space, which I watched in rerun at Grandma’s house. It was streamlined and aerodynamic.

Its long beak-like hood stretched out toward unknown adventures—things like swimming pools, parks and ice cream shops. The bulbous cab, which left little room for a rear trunk, enclosed us cousins in what felt like a space pod. It looked like a cross between a toucan’s head and a UFO.

One summer day, Grandma needed to go the bank. She toted my cousins and me along as usual. Sometimes she sprinted in and out with us, other times, like when there were three or more of us, she left us in the Citroën. We were too good at making a ruckus for her to bring us inside a building that made important money transactions.

Leaving us in the car that day, though, was a mistake she remembered for a long time.

We didn’t wear our seatbelts very often. In fact, I remember Grandma having some trouble in trying to make us do so. She was usually satisfied if we just kept our butts on the seats and our heads and arms out of the windows. Because we didn’t wear our belts, it was especially easy to rise from our seats and squirm around when we were stopped.

When Grandma went into the bank on the corner of South Virginia Street and Moana Lane, my cousin Natasha and I scooted from our butts onto our backs in the backseat. We stuck our legs up in the air and pushed our feet onto the car ceiling. It was covered with a soft velvet-like fabric. There was some give to it, like it was hollow underneath.

“Should I test it?” I wondered.

It was too late. I had already stuck my big toe through the headliner fabric—more delicate than I’d thought. It was hollow, except for some sawdust-like powder that rained onto my face.

I immediately realized that I would get in trouble for what I’d done, but Grandma never got wrathfully angry, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to do a little more damage. It was my car. I figured making my mark was like signing my initials next to some boy’s on a tree. It showed people I had been there, and I loved the car enough to permanently maim it.

My plan was to poke my pointer finger through the fabric over and over until I made enough little holes to spell my name. I had half of an M when grandma was spotted by my sister in the front seat over the dashboard.

“She’s coming,” Amber said. “You’re gonna get in trouble.”

Actually, we were all going to get in trouble. As soon as I had made my fascinating discovery, the fingers and toes of Amber and Natasha had also found their way into the empty guts of the ceiling of Grandma’s Citroën.

Grandma approached the door. After finding her seat, she scanned our faces. She knew. She so knew.

“What have you guys been doing,” she asked.

We indisputably responded, “Nothing.”

The three of us sat and waited and smiled and tried to dodge Grandma Winnie’s periwinkle blue eyes.

No more words were exchanged, and I don’t remember any of us looking up at the roof, although if someone did, it would have been my sister. Maybe Grandma caught Amber’s eyes shift from the floor to the roof, then down again. Maybe nothing gave us away other than Grandma’s suspicion and intuition.

One moment we were saying “nothing” and the next we were driving home with our seatbelts on—you can’t poke any more holes in the ceiling that way—and with the threat that Grandpa and our parents were going to hear all about this, unless we had the money to pay for it ourselves.

Grandma didn’t tell grandpa until several months down the road. Time heals all potentially angry grandpas. She probably figured that if he didn’t notice it, it wasn’t really a big deal. She probably appreciated the holes in the way that grandmas do—a reminder that she has grandkids she loves and adores, even if 50 percent of their time is spent acting more like fiendish imps than cherubs.

My imprint was on that Citroën’s ceiling until I was in high school and old enough to get my own real ride, a 9-year-old, 1987 Toyota Camry, which is still plugging along at almost 200,000 miles.

Years after the headliner’s mutilation, it must have been Grandpa’s decision to get it fixed. I think Grandma could have lived with our mistakes forever.